Facebook users: ask for Linux software

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> Linux is really starting to catch on more than most people realize.
> Partially its due to Ubuntu getting so much attention, and part of it
> is the fact that social networking and Twitter now make it possible
> for people to learn about alternatives to Windows when they otherwise
> would never have know there were any before.

That's true, and it's all got to help.

The thing is, though, that Linux is free. Ubuntu is slowly strangling
Mandriva and SUSE in the home/SME market, I think; RHEL and SUSE in
the enterprise space are doing OK for now. Increasingly, Linux means
you pay nothing.

And people get used to software for free and thus they become reluctant to pay.

When Linux started to prosper, in the early days - late 1990s, around
when I started playing with it, before KDE and thus reasonable
accessibility for non-specialists - it started by eating into the
space of the commercial desktop UNIXes: SCO Xenix and Unix, mainly,
but also smaller players like Interactive, BSD/386, desktop Solaris,
even Coherent.

These had supported a small software market for commercial desktop
Unix apps. Framemaker was probably the big star, but there was
Applixware, Mathematica, Wordperfect and other apps - lots of
specialist workstation stuff, in particular.

These companies all thought it was great stuff when this decent,
usable, *free* Unix appeared for commodity PCs. Most of the commercial
versions were $1000-$1500 or more, partly because of the cost of
AT&T's Unix licence.

But the market didn't expand. It shrank. The new users were hobbyists
running Linux on cheap PCs, rather than legions of pros on expensive
workstations, and the hobbyists expected their apps to be as free as
their OS. The pros deserted to Linux too, but that didn't grow the
market.

So the commercial desktop Unix market was actually damaged by Linux, not helped.

I doubt that many commercial software vendors are going to port to a
free OS. Some will, but not many, and mostly specialists.

Also, there is a regrettable, seldom-mentioned but real correlation
between people downloading legitimate free software and people
downloading illegitimate, pirated free software, off Bittorrent seeds
and so on. If anything, because Linux is so open and tweakable, it's
probably easier to pirate commercial Linux apps than Windows apps.
There are lots of commercial copy-protection products for Windows and
even some for Mac OS X.

In other words, frankly, I would reluctantly have to agree with
commercial companies that expressed reluctance to port to Linux. It's
not done well for many vendors so far - I can't name anyone that's had
a successful commercial app on Linux. Can anyone else?


-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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